ELSA BEAUMONT

France

website

Maison de Dieu

Biographie

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2005, and a freelance photographer and author, Elsa Beaumont's photographic practice is based on a documentary and social approach. Her long term projects consist in the realization of portraits in color, to put forward the excluded or marginalized people in our society. By crossing social and artistic views, her photographs seek to break down representations and overcome prejudices.

Présentation

For thirty-six years, a large building in the Cévennes region of France, called "Maison de Dieu", has been welcoming people who are homeless or who wish to live in community. Today, eighty residents of different ages and origins stay there. The founders, former backpackers, created this place with the intention that it be open to all. To live here, four rules must be respected: sharing resources, participating in collective tasks, attending daily meetings and practising non-judgement.
The people who live here are driven by a life force built on the margins of our society and its tendency to exclude or sideline. This place welcomes a great diversity of life paths and wounds, which makes this house a shelter, a refuge, a space of freedom where each person can take the time to recover, to take a break, to go at his or her own pace, and thus to grant themselves a form of renewal.
These photographs are tangible proof of the existence, strength and intrinsic resources of each person encountered. They seek to capture beings in suspension, whole, despite the vicissitudes of life. The presence of the surrounding nature, overflowing and untamed, dialogues with the bodies, one nourishes the other. We are on the edge, in a space between two, between light and dark, reinforced by the imposing and sometimes obscure presence of the house where rays of light enter, revealing certain details, certain areas, like elements that bear witness to a rediscovered intimacy in a shared living space. It is impossible to see everything, just as it is impossible to reveal everything about these people who are often resistant to photography. I am looking for signs of an opening, of a tacit agreement in a complex and fragile environment. The photographs only suggest, leaving the viewer free to imagine and question his own gaze.